Memories from Prison: A Reading of Abimael Guzman's Writings

Abimael Guzman, leader of Sendero Luminoso, has been the subject of fictional and journalistic writing, as well as the subject of academic studies. In the wide spectrum of speeches around his figure, we are interested in analyzing the self-configuration of the so-called President Gonzalo in his personal memoirs: De puno y letra (2009). This text that, seventeen years after his capture, collects documents, part of his autobiography and his legal defense problematizes the construction of his subjectivity and the ways in which the letter and politics intersect in mechanisms of self-expression and self-contemplation (Weintraub 1991) to reconstruct a life. This material was compiled by Elena Iparraguirre, Guzman's partner and second in command in Sendero Luminoso, which invites us to read it as a political and editorial framework that transcends the limits of the autobiographical record. Both its compiler and the author are problematic entities (Amicola 2008) because they create themselves a personality and a literary existence either based on what has been lived, moreover, on what must go beyond the limits of prison. Thus, intimacy from notions of memory, autobiography and writing of the self (Molloy 1991; Arfuch 2018; Sarlo 2005; Catelli 2007; Aira 2007) will allow us to examine the operations of self-representation of the "Sendero Luminoso" leader in a hybrid publication in its framework, and polemic in its content.